Hi Andreas, On 2021/03/23 00:54, Andreas K. Huettel wrote: >>> Council decided years ago that we don't support separate /usr without >>> an initramfs, but we haven't completed that transition yet. >> Which doesn't imply that we deliberately break things. > That's right. Though we should at some point start thinking about an end of > support for separate usr without initramfs. > > Why? Because the number of required hacks and complexity will only increase, > as will the number of uncooperative upstreams. It's called a strategic > retreat. :D > > My suggestion would be that the next profile version (21? 22?) declares > separate /usr a broken configuration, and explicitly encourages devs to > introduce all ebuild simplifications that are made possible by this. (Like > this symlink - no more conditional code.) No more discussions about "not > breaking things" at that point.
Why was it ever copied in the first place? For as long as I can recall (been using Gentoo since 2003) I've always been using a symlink here, not to mention a separate /usr (which has only been in the last year or so mounted from initrd along with /lib/firmware - which was the trigger point when it became too big to be contained on our normal / partition, the other fix would have been to be more selective in which firmware to install but that would be a higher administrative overhead). To this day I still believe that / should contain a minimal viable bootable system (give me a shell and just enough to perform basic tasks like activating LVM, repairing and mounting filesystems, and ideally some or another editor such as busybox vi is good enough, mostly everything else can go to /usr even with it being "split"). I still don't see why a split /usr is a bad thing. In fact, there are a significant number cases where I've had FS corruption which I was able to recover without the need for additional bootable media (which when working remotely via IP KVMs can be difficult at best) due to "living in the past" as you say. There is no reason a symbolic link can't cross a filesystem boundary ... it's hard links that can't. Kind Regards, Jaco > (Or to put it another way, I think we should stop wasting time and effort > here just to be able to live in the past.) >
